The present invention generally pertains to a process for ascertaining the identity of a telephone caller. More specifically, the present invention pertains to an application of speech recognition technology to collect the identity of a telephone caller in instances when traditional caller-ID is not adequate or not available.
Currently, it is common for individuals to receive a relatively large number of voice messages. For example, it is not uncommon for individuals to receive tens of new voice messages over a weekend. In addition, it is not uncommon for individuals to maintain twenty, thirty, or more saved messages on a voice message system. As the number of voice messages increases, the ability to efficiently listen to and sort messages diminishes.
Voice messages typically do not have any reliable indication of caller identity. Caller identification systems are known in the art but are limited to identifying an incoming phone number, which is possibly matched to a presumed caller if the phone number is associated with a person. Such systems only track a telephone and not a speaker. Therefore, the benefit of these caller identification systems to voice message and call routing systems is quite limited.
Without reasonably reliable caller identification information, it is difficult to generate a useful summary list of voice messages to enable a user of a voice message system to efficiently navigate through a collection of new or saved messages. As a result, most voice message systems do not include reliable means for efficiently listening to and/or sorting messages. For example, most current voice message systems present a user with a minimally helpful audio summary such as “you have three new messages and three saved messages.” Such summaries do not typically include any information related to the details of any call.
The lack of information associated with voice messages makes them generally more time consuming to review and organize. For example, in contrast to most electronic mail messages, a voice message cannot be eliminated based simply on indirect indications of message content, urgency or origin. In addition, saved voice messages generally cannot be sorted or organized into folders based on indirect indications of message content, urgency or origin.
Listening to and sorting voice messages presently requires a significant investment of time, because a system user must listen to each message simply to extract basic information such as a caller's identity and/or the urgency or subject matter of the phone call. For voice applications, rules generally cannot be implemented to automatically pre-organize messages. For example, it is virtually impossible to implement a rule to delete a voice message, or to save a voice message to a predetermined folder, based on a particular caller's identity and/or the subject matter or urgency of the phone call. Without a consistent indication of a caller's identity, it is also difficult to intelligently route phone calls based on a call recipient's preferences and priorities.